Brian Graf's Virtualization Blog

Preface I recently attended the Orlando VMUG Usercon and had been discussing many of the great features of the vSphere 6.5 release that was announced at VMworld Barcelona. I began to chat with Rob P., an attendee of the conference, about VCSA backup. Paraphrasing part of our chat he asked “I saw that you can …

There have been a number of updates done to the backend of Maintenance Mode in vSphere 6.5 that will make VI admins very happy: Faster host evacuation times Priority evacuation for templates and Powered-on VMs. Let me explain… Faster host evacuation times Evacuation times in the past have been acceptable, but as innovation continues to …

With all the changes to the VCSA 6.5 already discussed: CIP Deprecation vMon-CLI Photon OS VCSA Backup VCSA Restore 2-Stage Deployment Integrated Update Manager There are still even more changes and features. I would venture to say that since the release of the VCSA, there has been a 50/50 opinion that customers want to have …

The previous blog post was about natively backing up the VCSA 6.5. But a backup though is only as good as it’s ability to restore. To be able to restore a VCSA Backup, you will still need the VCSA 6.5 ISO handy, as you will kick off the Appliance Installer UI and click the ‘Restore’ …

Preface I recently attended the Orlando VMUG Usercon and had been discussing many of the great features of the vSphere 6.5 release that was announced at VMworld Barcelona. I began to chat with Rob P., an attendee of the conference, about VCSA backup. Paraphrasing part of our chat he asked “I saw that you can …

There have been a number of updates done to the backend of Maintenance Mode in vSphere 6.5 that will make VI admins very happy: Faster host evacuation times Priority evacuation for templates and Powered-on VMs. Let me explain… Faster host evacuation times Evacuation times in the past have been acceptable, but as innovation continues to …

With all the changes to the VCSA 6.5 already discussed: CIP Deprecation vMon-CLI Photon OS VCSA Backup VCSA Restore 2-Stage Deployment Integrated Update Manager There are still even more changes and features. I would venture to say that since the release of the VCSA, there has been a 50/50 opinion that customers want to have …

The previous blog post was about natively backing up the VCSA 6.5. But a backup though is only as good as it’s ability to restore. To be able to restore a VCSA Backup, you will still need the VCSA 6.5 ISO handy, as you will kick off the Appliance Installer UI and click the ‘Restore’ …

vSphere 6.5 introduces native Backup and Restore functionality with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). This means you will no longer need to use a 3rd-party backup tool to backup your vCenter. Backing it up also couldn’t be much simpler than it already is. Backing up the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) To back up your VCSA, …

With vSphere 6.5, and the deprecation of the Client Integration Plugin (CIP), our team has made a very easy to use vCenter UI installer that can be run from Linux, Mac, or Windows. The deployment/installation is split into two stages: Stage 1: Deploy Appliance Stage 2: Configuration of Appliance Deploy is very straight forward as …

If you haven’t seen my post on Encrypted vMotions already, click HERE to read about it. PowerCLI Module for Encrypted vMotion Last week as I was thinking about our new Encrypted vMotion feature, I thought “I wonder how we can consume this data at scale?” and ‘at scale’ for me meant anything greater than 5 …

Encrypted vMotions A feature that many folks I believe are very excited to see come to light is the ability to do encrypted vMotions. Since vMotion’s inception, vMotions have not been secured, but that hasn’t really been an issue until vSphere 6 when cross-vCenter vMotion came out because VMware best practices were to put vMotion …

For all vSphere HA 6.5 updates see the other parts of this series: Part 1: vSphere HA – UI Part 2: vSphere HA – Admission Control Part 3: vSphere HA – Orchestrated Restart VM Restart Priorities In the past, we’ve had 3 restart priorities that can be used with VM Overrides: Low Medium High However, …

That’s right folks. I’ll keep this short and sweet so you can go on your day rejoicing… This means: No more having to fuss with downloading and installing with admin rights. No more having to troubleshoot why your browser says you don’t have it installed No more having to worry about different versions of CIP …

For all vSphere HA 6.5 updates see the other parts of this series: Part 1: vSphere HA – UI Part 2: vSphere HA – Admission Control One of the best and 3rd highest used feature in vCenter is vSphere High-Availability (HA). vSphere HA allows virtual machines to restart onto running hosts should the host they …

Up until now (from vSphere 5.5), the VCSA ran on SLES, with the latest running on SLES 11. Starting with vSphere 6.5, the vCenter Server Appliance is now running VMware’s own Photon OS, which is a Minimal Linux Container Host, optimized for running on the VMware platform. Why is this important? This was a great …

Gone are the days of /etc/init.d for vSphere services. VMware has come up with a better method to handle working with the services and watchdogs that were in vSphere 6 (and yes, there were many)! VMON now simplifies the watchdog services as well as provides a framework for handling services, APIs, and CLIs moving forward. …

In Part 1, I go over the changes to the vSphere Availability UI. You can see that post HERE: I wanted to take some time to focus on what has changed with Admission Control since vSphere 6, as this is significant and has even received roomfuls of clapping from customers in our betas and on-sites, …

Ok! Let’s go! vSphere HA has had a little bit of an organizational redesign. I’ll say again here what I did in my Proactive HA blog post HERE: (Ok, Pause!) Now before everyone freaks out, let me explain why this doesn’t say vSphere HA. When we added this feature [Proactive HA], although it leverages DRS …

Adding onto the many other new features and functionality that I’ve written about in Part 1 and Part 2, I want to touch on Proactive HA. Although Proactive HA sounds like it is an HA feature (and you will see that it is under an availability tab), it is actually a feature of DRS that …

In Part 1, we discussed some of the updates in the UI as well as new advanced options, Network-Aware DRS, and a few algo enhancements. Read it HERE. Even though that blog post ended up being longer than my usual posts, there’s still additional greatness coming from DRS. I want to focus on Predictive DRS, what …

As we begin to go through all of the new features and functionalities of vSphere 6.5, I wanted to take some time to point out some new features and updates to current functionalities of DRS, since I am the Product Manager for Distributed Resource Management. So let’s jump in! Additional Options When you head over …

As VMware and Amazon made their announcement today in San Francisco, many folks started to follow what was being announced and began to have many questions. While many details are still yet to come, I’ve found the following video to be very informative for customers as it answers most questions I’ve received so far as …

An epic announcement was made today, where VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will join together to create “VMware Cloud on AWS”. Although there was an apparent leak last week that a partnership was coming, most speculation was wrong about what this means. Let’s dive in! VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) At this point, there …